We provide 2 easy ways to place a support request during business hours (8-5 M-F):
- Phone Call - 260-205-8900. We always try to answer the phone live - simply identify yourself and your organization, and let us know how we can help. If you happen to get our voicemail (after about 20 seconds of ringing), then everyone is on the phone - just leave a message with your name, organization name, callback number, and a brief description of the issue, and we'll do our best to get right back with you - usually this means around 15-20 minutes. Note: we get notified immediately with a transcription of the voicemail, so if it's clearly something NOT urgent, it could be more than 15-20 minutes, and if you make it clear this IS an urgent issue, we will do our best to postpone or wrap up a non-urgent call in order to call you back sooner. Our customers tend to be very understanding, as they know we do the same for them when the roles were reversed.
- Email - techsupport@pinnacletechnology.solutions - there's no special format, just email us from your company email (if possible), and let us know what's going on (with screenshots if applicable). Please be patient if we respond with something along the lines of "please call us when you have a few minutes to show us what's going on live". We strongly focus on SEEING the problem ourselves and understanding it fully before working on a solutions. Emails tend to be better for updates on existing issues or change requests, rather than describing complicated problem.
(A lot of) details to help understand how we operate - we want to get to know you, and we want you to get to know us!
- Phone calls are always prioritized over email. If you need a response in an hour or less, you probably want to call instead of email.
- There's no cost to your organization when you call us. We charge a flat fee per month that covers all calls. If you call about something that's out of scope, we'll let you know.
- We want to be your first call - if you're not certain if an issue is Pinnacle or another vendor, call us first! The last thing we want is for you to waste a bunch of time on the phone with Frontier before we've confirmed it's something that requires their assistance.
- Emailed issues go through a somewhat complicated triage process with something like 20 classifications based on criteria like the number of people impacted, the nature of the applications impacted, etc. We prioritize "whole company can't work" (which should be a phone call, NOT email) over "one person has a particular application broken", which in turn is prioritized over a "new user request", etc. We don't make promises about turnaround time on emails, but our goal is that brokenness with significant user impact is worked around or investigated within an hour.
- We want the end user (i.e. the person who understands the problem most fully) to be the one that contacts us. Our entire goal with support is to "cut out the middle man". The fewer people involved in an issue (on both sides), the more quickly it tends to get resolved.
- We're a small team of 5. If you've been working with somebody already on an issue, speak up and let us know. We don't want you to have to re-explain things if we can simply get you transferred to the person who already worked on the issue (or have them call you back shortly).
- We don't want you stuck in a "ping pong" game between Pinnacle and another outside vendor. If the other vendor says it's a Pinnacle issue, please ask them to conference us in, or put them on hold and conference us in yourself. As soon as they've established that we're allowed to work directly with them, we'll try to "cut you out" of the middle and resolve the issue directly with the other vendor.
- Sometimes we may ask you to text a picture (or rarely a video) to our support number (260-205-8900), especially while we're live on the phone with you. Please understand that texting is a "receive-only" system that essentially just comes in by email like any other email. We quite intentionally do not attempt to provide support via text messaging, because texting really provides nothing that can't be done just as well (or better) via a telephone call or email.
- ScreenConnect is our remote support tool. While it is a bit jarring at first, when you call us and identify yourself, we typically "jump on" your computer remotely as you're giving the initial description of the problem (often within about 10-15 seconds). Please don't be offended if we politely "cut you off" at that point and simply ask you to "show us" the issue. We can get a lot more context this way, grab our own screenshots for documentation, duplicate the issue ourselves, etc.
- We prioritize fixing things "fully", not just working around problems. This usually means being methodical and taking a bit more time to understand a problem before even attempting a solution. As a result, an individual issue might take us a little more time to resolve than might seem necessary, but if we understand and fix the issue fully across our entire customer base, then everybody wins in the long run.
- Escalation - we certainly don't want to be the stereotypical "clueless/worthless" tech support, but we're not perfect, either. If you ever feel like you're talking to somebody who just doesn't understand what's going on, please don't beat your head against the wall - just kindly ask if Jeremy is available. There are occasionally some very unique situations that are very difficult to document/understand without more context.
- After hours - as a rule, we don't read emails after hours, so you must call if you need assistance more quickly than the next business day. Our after hours voicemail message allows you press 0 to reach the on call technician. We try to answer these live whenever possible, but sometimes we have to call back within 10-15 minutes. If you haven't received a response in 15 minutes, please call back. We always reserve the right to charge $75/call for any after hours calls, but in practice, we want this to be a partnership and we're very understanding of true emergencies (i.e. where somebody can't do their job). If you call about a non-emergency after hours, we'd rather discuss the definition of "emergency" than to just send you a bill for $75/call.
- Once or twice a year we end up in a "widespread outage" mode for an hour or two because of a significant outage of some sort that impacts many/all of our customers (e.g. the phone company is down, Frontier has a city-wide outage, or Microsoft 365 is down). You may find it difficult to get through via normal channels as we're trying to assess and resolve the outage while also fielding phone calls. In this case, check https://status.pinnacletechnology.solutions/ (also linked at the bottom of our main website). Once we've established that there's a widespread outage, we will update the status page, start taking messages for any non-urgent calls, telling everyone impacted by the emergency to head to our status page for updates so that we can communicate updates promptly and effectively.